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OPS Creates Film Short For June IWC Meeting

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:15:00 GMT

Boulder-June 9, 2008- The Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) of the United States, an environmental film group with the support of the Chilean NGO Centro de Conservacion Cetacea (CCC) is releasing a short film of recently acquired covert footage of Japanese whalers slaughtering dolphins, to media groups, non government organizations (NGOs) and delegates to the 60th annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

In anticipation of the June IWC meeting in Santiago, and the expected bid by Japan to open coastal whaling, OPS and CCC hope to highlight Japan’s continued efforts to overturn the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling.

Japanese whalers have slaughtered nearly a million small cetaceans, dolphins and porpoises, since the moratorium, many in a secret cove in the southern coastal town, Taiji, a whaling town that Japan’s IWC delegation has been trying to revive since the moratorium. The Japanese Deputy Director of Far Seas Fisheries, Hideki Moronuki and Joji Morishita, Japan’s representative for the IWC, claim the marine mammals are killed in a humane and instant manner, yet OPS’ footage shows a very different picture.

“Dolphins and porpoises are whales and size doesn’t matter,” says Louie Psihoyos, executive director of OPS, who has spent the last three years making a full length documentary film on dolphin slaughter, and the high mercury content of the meat. “The IWC has overlooked the littlest leviathans since the moratorium was put in place, even though their mandate is to manage all whales. This short film will shed light on the truth the Japanese whalers don’t want the world to see. One can argue that killing animals in any way is inhumane but both Morishita and Moronuki are aware that the dolphin meat is toxic and is being given away to school children to promote the commercial sale of whale meat. We are hoping the film will help sway the vote of any IWC delegate that is thinking of voting with Japan to open up commercial whaling. Killing nearly a million small cetaceans is commercial whaling, and allowing the highly toxic meat to be given away to school children is criminal, “ Psihoyos says. “Unfortunately we still can’t trust the Japanese whalers.”

With no management scheme in place, Japanese whalers slaughter entire pods in the most brutal way imaginable. CCC and OPS feel that allowing Japan to resume coastal whaling ignores the fact that they never really stopped, and that without international observers the Japanese whalers continue to kill whales, even mothers and calves, a practice that is banned yet shown in the PSA.

The world salutes Chilean President Michelle Bachelet’s recent announcement that she will send legislation to parliament banning all whaling activities in Chilean waters.

Many conservationists see this as a triumph, yet expect a showdown in Santiago as Japan continues to influence votes in their favor.

Elsa Cabrera, executive director of the Cetacean Conservation Center explained that “the world needs to know about the slaughter of whales and dolphins in Japanese waters since it not only undermines the moratorium in place and threatens cetaceans populations that we know little or nothing about, but it also poses serious human health risk associated with the high level of mercury and other toxins found in whale meat and products. We hope members of the IWC will take these evidences into account when the Commission discusses the Japanese proposal to lift the moratorium.”

Contact:

Louie Psihoyos
Executive Director
Oceanic Preservation Society, US
www.opsociety.org

Viki Psihoyos
Communications
Oceanic Preservation Society
viki@psihoyos.com

Elsa Cabrera
Executive Director
Cetacean Conservation Center
Ph/Fax: (56 2) 228 2910
info@ccc-chile.org

Sushi and Sunshine

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:26:00 GMT

Boulder, CO., January 21, 2008 - Oceanic Preservation Society, executive director, Louie Psihoyos donated an electric car to his film team today, the first step in a solutions-based program to help save the oceans. Just back from his sixth visit to Japan in three years, he has radically changed his view of sushi and sunshine.

Pollution of the oceans, particularly mercury from coal-fired power plants is one of the biggest problems now facing humanity. Mercury has been rising about 2% a year. Its level has risen about 5 times since the industrial revolution. Methyl-mercury, and other pollutants bioaccumulate in our top predator fish like tuna, swordfish, shark, mackerel and tilefish. Pregnant women or women expecting to become pregnant within two years or children under six should not eat tuna, any tuna at all.

Those advisories from the EPA and FDA have been highly manipulated by powerful lobbies in Congress. I suspect, as do many experts that we interviewed for our movie, that we should not be eating any ocean apex predators at all.

A major turning point for me came when the OPS team visited Minamata, Japan, site of the worst mercury outbreak in history. Back in the 1950’s through the 1960’s the Chisso Corporation was dumping mercury-laced effluent, a by-product of the acetaldehyde process used in the manufacture of plastics, into a canal, which dumped into the nearby Shiranui Sea. When the company executives discovered they were poisoning fisherman and their families south of the plant they, diverted their dumping into the Minamata River, which then poisoned an entirely different fishing community. Hundreds of thousands of people were exposed. The Japanese government has since been convicted of helping Chisso cover up the outbreak and is now paying legal damages.

Japanese school children are unwittingly fed mercury-laced dolphin meat for lunch
© Louie Psihoyos/OPSociety.org

While we were there, we took a group of scientists and doctors who study the Minamata tragedy out for lunch and none of them ate the fish. None - even though the fish came from other parts of the world. They just ate veggie sushi, and these are Japanese people who, as a culture, eat on average 66 kilos of seafood per person per year – the highest rate of any culture in the world.

One of the scientists told me about a frightful experiment that he and five colleagues conducted on each other that changed the entire hospital staff’s view of seafood. They jokingly called it, the “Supersize Me Experiment-Japanese style”. The scientists had been curious about the speed that mercury bioaccumulates in the human body. Aware of the ethics of potentially poisoning outside subjects, they chose to conduct the experiments on themselves. Also, they couldn’t convince the university to pay for it – so they paid for it themselves. The scientists decided that each would eat 200 grams of tuna every day, for 30 days, checking their mercury levels weekly. 200 grams is equivalent to roughly 7 ounces, or less than half a can of tuna per day. The mercury levels of the subjects climbed at an alarming rate each week. They all knew they were etching out neurons in their precious grey matter. Then, the experiment suddenly had a new variable – with the bonito season over, their tuna purveyor ran out of cheap cuts of tuna – all he had left were the more expensive, sushi grade cuts from the belly of the large bluefin. Some of the scientists felt relieved, surely the expensive cuts were safer, but after the following week’s blood test, that’s when they were all kicked through the looking glass and their lives changed forever.

Their already high levels had quadrupled – the sushi grade tuna was 4 times as toxic as the cheap cuts. The fatty (and most expensive) sushi bioaccumulated the most toxins. The net result was that after 4 weeks, the researchers’ mercury levels had risen on average, eight times per person – not yet to Minamata victim levels, but on a trajectory they would soon fall into lockstep with that deadly path.

In China alone, there is one new coal-fired plant scheduled to come on line every week for the next 20 years. Dr Roger Payne, who for the last 6 years has been researching how toxins bioaccumulate in whales told me that “if we lose excess to fish in the sea we will be causing a stress to humanity which I can safely say is the biggest health concern humanity has ever faced.

Much of the dolphin meat tested in Japan which are fed to school children have higher levels of mercury than the fish that caused Minamata’s disease. And it’s not just mercury which bioaccumulates in whales and dolphins, it’s also cadmium and lead and a whole host of toxic chemicals call POP’s (Persistent Organic Pollutants) which are showing up in large quantities in the ocean’s apex predators, that is, all the fish we love to eat.

I’ve been a vegetarian for 23 years, my main source of protein is fish - as is the rest of the world’s. Humanity derives 70% of its protein from the oceans. 7 out of 10 people. After meeting with the Minamata researchers, they recommended that I have my own blood-mercury levels checked back in the US. I found that had 24 parts per million of mercury in my system. A high level for concern in the U.S. is five parts.

I was advised to no longer eat apex ocean predators. Mercury has a half-life in the human body of about 70-90 days, yet while it’s in your system, the scientists told me, damage is being done even in small amounts. Those delicate neurons I saw etched away in the brains of children and adults, kept in jars at Kumamoto University research labs. I wondered how much I have lost. And I’m just one person – what foundation for a future hell are we laying out now for the next generations and what can we do about it now?

Sometimes it seems daunting to resist what seems like overwhelming odds – after all we are all just one person. But every revolution begins by someone or a whole group of people taking the first step. Yesterday I went out and bought and donated an electric car for OPS. It’s a small car, made by Zenn (stands for Zero-Emission No Noise) It’s a two seater from Canada, based on a diesel car called the Metro which is made in France. It has plenty of trunk space for trips around town – it will fill about 90% of our driving needs and I’ll be able to hide my SUV around back and reserve it for the occasional trips to the airport or the mountains. What’s really cool though is that I have also ordered a 24-kilowatt solar power plant for the roof of OPS and in the next few months our electric car and 100% of basic electrical needs in the studio will be powered by the sun. With 300 days of sunshine in Boulder, during the summer months, we will be selling energy back to the electric company. Is it expensive? Yes, but there are some great rebates to be had now and the real cost of cheap energy is what few of us talk about – the cost of leaving behind a legacy that no animal in the wild will do, fowl its own nest.

It’s been a dream of mine since our team began making this movie that we not just complain about and expose problems– but we also offer some sound solutions.

Alternative energy sounds like the wrong kind of name for what I feel should be a priority for all of us – it’s almost derogatory – like some fringe spacey lifestyle. I think we should call it Smart Energy – and I think future generations would agree.

Our cost of the Iraqi War, which is all about energy security, is going to reach somewhere north of 2 trillion dollars. That works out to about $24,000 for every man, woman and child in America, enough hard cash to easily put an electric car in every driveway and a solar array on every rooftop in America. At the end of war you leave behind a wasteland of broken people and structures. Even if you put 1% of that lost wealth into research for Smart Energy, give it away as research grants to our best and brightest at our top universities and develop incentives programs, we would find solutions to the biggest problems now facing humanity - clean energy and a healthy food supply.

As for OPS we’re not going to wait for our politicians to see the light, we’ve seen it, we’re harnessing it and were going to begin selling it back to the energy companies.

Onwards and Upwards all,

Louie Psihoyos

Executive Director of the Oceanic Preservation Society

Something’s in the Water

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:25:00 GMT

Boulder, CO., February 17, 2008 - The OPS team set out two years ago to make a beautiful documentary film about dolphins and whales. We have, but we also came up with an epic horror film whose plot resembles that of a Steven King novel. The fate of dolphins and humans intertwines, which led us to a secret cove hidden away in a Japanese National Park in Taiji, Japan.

On the surface, this sleepy little village appears to love dolphins and whales. Whaling began here, 400 years ago. There are statues of dolphins and whales everywhere, a whaling museum and a tour boat shaped like dolphins and whales.   However this coastal village of has a very dark secret, one they don’t want the world to know about. Taiji is the site of the largest slaughter of dolphins in the world.

Every year from September to April, whalers from the town set out in 13 boats and round up migrating dolphins by banging on pipes. The underwater wall of sound disrupts their sonar, which the whalers use to force them into a shallow lagoon. Several dozen are selected and sold to the multi-billion dollar captive dolphin industry where they are trained to do tricks, or sold to swim -with -dolphin programs. The rest of the dolphins are slaughtered and their meat is given away for school lunch programs around Japan even though their meat is toxic. Technically, the average bottlenose dolphin bioaccumulates so many pollutants, including mercury, that in the U.S., their washed up bodies should be disposed of as toxic waste, yet in Japan they are fed to children.

    Now this is where the bigger horror story begins, one that affects us all, even if you don’t eat dolphins or whales.

            Since the Industrial Revolution and all that it brought, mercury in the oceans has risen about five times. The U.N estimates about 2 percent a year. This is due mainly to the burning of fossil fuels, particularly coal which releases the embedded mercury into the atmosphere and accounts for about 70% of the mercury found in the oceans. Mercury bioaccumulates up the food chain so most of our apex predators like whales, dolphins, tuna, shark, swordfish, mackerel and marlin are now toxic even in small doses. In a few generations, mankind has manages to do what no animal in the history of the earth has done, foul it’s own nest.

Even low doses of mercury, a few parts per million, has been found to have deleterious effects on the neurons in the brain, particularly the developing brain of a fetus or young child. Women expecting to be become pregnant, or who are pregnant should not eat anything from those seemingly harmless cans of tuna. Birth defects and learning disabilities are some of the effects of mercury. Higher levels lead to symptoms resembling cerebral palsy or dementia in adults.
Many of the Japanese scientists and doctors we interviewed no longer eat any large fish at all. 70 percent of the human race relies on seafood as a major source of protein. The Japanese people eat, on average, 66 kilos per person per year and while China per capita eats less, as a whole they now account for more seafood consumption. But the smart money has already turned away from eating our top ocean seafood.

In China alone, there is one new coal-fired power plant set to open up every week for the next 20 years. The oceans are not going to get cleaner any time soon unless we make a major reversal in the way we get our energy. New Zealand, perhaps, is one of the model countries to emulate; they generate about 75 percent of their energy from alternative sources, wind, hydro and solar.

There is an Iroquois law that states that decisions should be regarded by their impact on the seventh generation to come. Mankind has historically thought no further forward than the next rent check.

As for OPS, we are doing something about the problem besides making a film, We’re now driving a Zenn electric car, a small low-powered neighborhood vehicle for trips around town and next month we’re installing a 24-kilowatt solar system on the roof. As soon as that’s complete we’re going to put a bumper sticker on our runabout, “VUS – vehicle using solar,” the opposite of an SUV.

Dolphins are the only wild animals known to come to the rescue of humans. In ancient Greece this was well known and it was a fine, punishable by death, to harm a dolphin. With this film we’d like to come to their rescue and in the process, perhaps save ourselves.

Human Hearts Might Save Dolphins After All

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:16:00 GMT

Boulder, CO., January 23, 2008 - The New York Times has broken the high mercury story recently on its front page.

The Rising, OPS’ film due for summer 2008 release, also highlights dangerous mercury levels in certain seafood, commonly thought to be safe for consumption. The NYTimes article focuses on tuna sushi, having performed independent mercury content tests on various tuna served around New York City. Also mentioned is a 2007 New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene survey, where the average level of mercury in New Yorkers’ blood was found to be three times higher than the national average.

Echoing the theme of the upcoming film, increased awareness of rising mercury levels in seafood will hopefully cause consumers to reduce consumption. The film, which depicts the slaughter of dolphins for their meat, highlights the risk of eating dolphin, and other apex predators.

“The city warned women who are pregnant or breast-feeding and children not to eat fresh tuna, Chilean sea bass, swordfish, shark, grouper and other kinds of fish it describes as ‘too high in mercury.’(Cooking fish has no effect on the mercury level.)”

Studies suggest that mercury consumption is linked to health problems, including an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and neurological symptoms in adults.

“We’ve been preaching this for the last two years now,’ says Louie Psihoyos, director of The Rising. “People have been skeptical of the info that we have, but when the old ‘Grey Lady' mentions this, hopefully now the prophets will be respected in their own country.”

Contact:
Viki Psihoyos
viki@psihoyos.com

OPS Team Home Safe After Japan Horror

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:16:00 GMT

Boulder, CO, Nov. 12, 2007 - After documenting the dolphin and whale slaughter that runs from September to March each year, in Taiji, Japan, the 12-member Oceanic Preservation Society film team returns to their Boulder, CO studio. Their footage of an international group of professional surfers, actresses and other celebrities’ objection to the practice will be edited into the OPS film due for Summer 2008 release.

This was the sixth time filmmaker Louie Psihoyos has led a crew to the little-known “killing cove”in southern Japan, where the migrating mammals are herded into a shallow bay for slaughter. Shielded from view by towering cliffs, tarps, barrier fences, and hostile guards, about 2300 dolphins are speared locally. This represents one-tenth of the 23,000 dolphins killed around Japan for human consumption. In Taiji, the OPS film team used a variety of covert techniques to record the slaughter and was, yet again, trailed by local police and narrowly avoided arrest.

OPS initially planned to film a peaceful “paddle-out” or memorial ceremony organized by legendary waverider Dave Rastovich. “Dolphins are the original surfers,” says Rastovich, “they can school even the best of their human counterparts – I wanted to draw attention to their plight by holding a ceremony, this surfing ritual we do to honor a mate when they die.” Aside from his respect for dolphins as the ultimate surfer, Rastovich has a special affinity for dolphins, two days after forming his non-profit Surfers for Cetaceans; a bottlenose dolphin saved him and a mate from a tiger shark attack while he was surfing.

Rastovich and 30 of his fellow surfers from around the world had converged on the small fishing village, which had been alerted to their plans. The daily slaughter was suspended, yet the surfers proceeded. They paddled out to the empty cove, quietly held hands in a circle, honoring the spirits of the dead with prayers, threw flowers into the center of their circle and paddled back to the beach where a swarm of police had gathered to check their passports. The following day, however, word reached the OPS team and Rastovich as they were leaving the country that the whalers had resumed their practice – about 40 pilot whales were captured that afternoon. A swift, covert operation was deployed to repeat the memorial amongst a trapped pod of pilot whales and their calves. The OPS team managed and monitored the event. The now famous footage made headlines.

Six surfers, including Rastovich, his wife and mermaid model Hannah Fraser, Heroes TV star Hayden Panettiere, Australian actress Isabel Lucas, author Peter Heller and professional surfer, Karina Petroni attempted to paddle out to the surviving pod of pilot whales and their calves

Entering water already stained with blood, the surfers were prevented from reaching the creatures by the angry, violent whalers, who blocked their paths with whirling boat propellers, and a large pronged boat hook that is used to push whales around. The surfers were bruised, held their ceremony but were forced to retreat but within 24 hours. Footage of the disturbing scene, including Panettiere’s emotional collapse on shore, aired globally.

Despite international outcry, the whalers defend the practice, claiming dolphins are pests that deplete the fish stock. The dolphin meat, which tests confirm has toxic levels of mercury, is sold without warning labels in supermarkets alongside other seafood, in addition to being fed to children as part of school lunch programs.

Also, representatives of the captive dolphin industry often line the shore during capture, selecting healthy, attractive females for shipment for dolphinariums around the world. Valued at between $45,000 and $200,000 USD each, sales to dolphin shows and swim-with-dolphin programs perpetuate this form of commercial whaling.

The OPS film, working title Something’s In The Water, will be released Summer 2008.

Contact:

Viki Psihoyos
viki@psihoyos.com